by Abby Gaines
“Lucas…sweetheart,” she said. “Is Dwight still coming to get Dad, or is that why you’re here?”
“I’m here to take you home, honeybun, that’s all.” His fingers caressed her shoulders through her sweater. “And to tell John our idea.”
Uh-oh. It would be typical Lucas behavior to declare himself in charge and start issuing orders.
“John, it occurred to me you’re going to need some help when you first go back to work,” Lucas said.
“There’s a guy who sometimes helps out when I get busy,” her dad said. “Thought I might hire him.”
“No need,” Lucas said. “I can help out for a few weeks, until you get back up to full strength.”
“You?” Merry said. But why not Lucas? He’d worked there before.
“I appreciate that,” John said gruffly. “Very much.”
“But…I work at the boatyard,” Merry said.
“What more could I want than to work with my wife?” he said with a grim relish that told her the prospect was as painful to him as it was to her. And yet, for whatever reason, he was determined to do it.
“We’d be together all day.” She said it with a smile, trying to sound concerned rather than alarmed. “There can be too much of a good thing.”
“There wasn’t for me and your mother,” John said happily.
“I plan to do this properly, Merry,” Lucas said. “All or nothing.”
What did he mean do this properly? When he said “all,” he didn’t mean… Of course not. They’d already both vowed they wouldn’t have sex again. She planned to stick to that resolution like a leech to a blood vessel.
Her dad was nodding, hearing this conversation as innocuous.
This is what I wanted. For Dad. For his health. She’d been ready to blackmail Lucas for his cooperation, for Pete’s sake.
Now, it appeared he was offering it freely. Take it, before he changes his mind.
Oblivious to the undercurrents, her father jabbered about the boat Lucas would be helping him build. Lucas was watching her, waiting for an answer. All or nothing?
Merry had the sense of stepping off a precipice as she said, “All.”
CHAPTER TEN
“JOHN WYATT, I HAVEN’T SEEN you in here in more years than I can count.” Merline, the waitress at Pete’s Burger Shack, clutched the menus to her ample chest as if she wasn’t about to let them go until she’d had a darned good look at John. And his date.
“Hi, Merline.” He had chosen Pete’s because there was enough going on there that he and Nurse Martin wouldn’t be conscious of awkward pauses. John hadn’t thought about the fact that people here knew him and now would know he was dating someone. One date, it’s just one date. No one cares, except me.
So far, it had been bearable, if not enjoyable. John wasn’t allowed to drive for at least four weeks after the operation, so Nurse Martin—Cathy, I need to call her Cathy—had picked him up, rather than the other way around. It didn’t feel right, but they’d managed to chat enough on the way here for things not to seem too strained.
“You look awful,” Merline said with the bluntness he’d forgotten. “Skinny as a scarecrow. You been sick?”
“A little,” he said. Then, since she was eyeing his date with blatant curiosity, he said, “Merline, this is Cathy Martin.”
Merline showed them to a booth against the left wall. It was a little quieter on that side; maybe her policy was to put older customers there.
John looked around and realized he was at least ten years older than anyone else in the room. Ten years ago was probably the last time he’d been here, and that had been with Merry.
“This place is a New London institution,” he told Nurse—Cathy, who was looking around curiously. “You haven’t been here before?”
“No.” Spoken with her usual conversation-killing brusqueness.
John picked up his menu.
“Pete does great burgers,” he said. Maybe he should have taken her somewhere fancier. The Shack was looking a little worse for wear.
Cathy, on the other hand, looked…okay. At the hospital, her hair was always pulled back tightly. Now, loose around her shoulders, it looked softer. It was a blond-brown color, which he assumed wasn’t natural, since she had to be in her mid-fifties. She wore makeup, which even to John’s untrained eye looked inexpert—the lipstick was all right, but her eyes had too much…something. She wore black pants and an apricot-colored sweater. She had a curvier figure than he was used to.
Thankfully, he wasn’t allowed to have sex until at least six weeks after the surgery. Even more thankfully, Nurse—Cathy would know that, so the subject wouldn’t even come up.
She frowned as she scanned her menu, as if she couldn’t see anything that met his description of “great burger.”
I’m not trying to impress her, he reminded himself. Quite the opposite. All he wanted to do was get through this, so he could move on from his idiotic resolution—to ask out the first woman he saw—to someone nicer.
By the time he’d been discharged from the hospital, John had realized Nurse Cathy Martin wasn’t the right woman for him to date, not even once. But much to his surprise, she’d cornered him right before he left, and asked when he planned to take her to dinner. He’d entered her number into his cell phone and promised to call her.
John didn’t go back on his word.
If the date doesn’t go well—he was pretty sure it wouldn’t—I’ll give it an hour, then say I’m feeling dizzy and I need to go home. She would know dizziness was a side effect of his antirejection medication, which he was taking in high doses in these early days.
“You see something you like?” he asked. “I think I’ll have the bacon double cheeseburger and a Coke.” Cheese and cola had been forbidden foods before the transplant, when his phosphorous levels had been too high. The surgery had sent them too far the other way, so Dr. Randall was actively encouraging him to eat more of those foods.
“I’ll try the chicken burger,” she said. “I might have a glass of red wine with that.”
John signaled Merline and placed their orders. If they were to get out of here within the hour, they’d better get started.
“So, uh, Cathy,” he said, when Merline was gone, “what do you, uh… Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?” He should have rehearsed some conversational gambits—he sounded like a twelve-year-old. Come to think of it, most of today’s twelve-year-olds had probably had more girlfriends than he had.
“I came on staff at the hospital a few months back,” she said. “I was previously at the pediatric hospital in Groton.”
Groton and New London sat on opposite sides of the Thames River. Though they were only a mile apart, crossing the Goldstar, the steel bridge that linked them, could feel like a major excursion. John hardly ever went to Groton. He tried to imagine her being kind and gentle, nursing sick children. Turned out his imagination wasn’t up to the task.
“Do you have kids?” he asked. He’d assumed from the start she wasn’t currently married, since she wasn’t wearing a ring.
She shook her head. “No kids. My husband and I tried for a long time. He left me for a more fertile woman twelve years ago and now has three.”
“Uh…” John said. For his next date, he’d find someone less blunt.
She shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “Do you have just the one daughter?”
John felt his face soften at the mention of Merry. “Yeah. Sally, my wife, died when Merry was three years old. We were working on having another kid, but…”
“How did your wife die?” Cathy asked.
Merline arrived with their drinks; John waited until she’d gone again. He took a sip of his Coke. Man, he’d missed this stuff.
“Car accident,” he said. “She’d been visiting a girlfriend. Some jerk ran a red light....”
“I’m so sorry.” Cathy did actually sound sorry, and her face had gone pink with what might have been sympathy.
“It was a long
time ago,” John said. He didn’t want to talk about Sally, and was casting about for another topic of conversation when Cathy said, “What kind of work do you do?”
He could tell from her stilted tone that she’d rehearsed her questions. Not very well, but at least she was more prepared than he was.
“I build boats,” he said gratefully. “Handcrafted wooden sailboats.” He told her more about his business, then realized he was talking too much. He shut up.
“Sounds like hard physical work,” Cathy said. “You won’t be able to get back to that for a while.”
That pessimistic streak might wear a guy down.
“I have orders to fill,” he said. “I can’t just ignore them. Lucas will help out with the heavy labor. There are some things I can do—painting, electrical work, maybe some sanding. But not for another week.”
“How will you fill the time until then?” she asked.
Was she angling for another date?
“I used to like to paint watercolors,” he said. “Haven’t had much time for that, so maybe I’ll start up again.” Before she could interrogate him further, he asked, “Do you like nursing?”
“I love it,” she said fiercely, surprising him.
“You don’t seem that happy in your work,” he said before he could censor himself.
She reddened. “I guess you think I’m a real grouch.” She sounded a little hurt, which was unreasonable. If she didn’t want to be thought a grouch, she should be less grouchy.
“Nursing must be stressful,” he said.
Merline arrived with their food. They took some time freeing knives and forks from the tightly wrapped paper napkins and seasoning their meals.
John used the seconds spent cutting his overflowing burger in half to sneak a glance at his watch. They’d been here twenty-five minutes.
Cathy caught him clock watching. She cleared her throat. “Nursing is stressful, but that’s not…that doesn’t matter. I lost someone last year. Actually, a year ago this month. I’m finding the anniversary hard.”
“I’m sorry.” John picked up half his burger. Did she mean a boyfriend? A partner, as they called them these days. My partner. No, he didn’t like it.
“It was my sister,” she said. “My twin.”
John’s irritation with her dissolved in a wave of sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said again, only this time it was heartfelt. “Were you identical?” He wasn’t sure if that made a difference, but he sensed it might.
Cathy nodded. “Rue was fuller in the face and figure than I am, just a little. When we were together, you could tell us apart because of that, but if you met one of us on our own you might not be sure.”
“What happened?” John asked.
Cathy drank some of her wine. “She was on vacation in the Bahamas with a couple of girlfriends and had a massive heart attack. Neither of us had a weak heart, far as we knew. I spoke to her on the phone, in the hospital, told her I was on my way. But she had another attack and died before I got there.”
Her loss was so much more recent than his own, and equally significant, John realized. “It must have been agony.”
Cathy looked taken aback at his emotive choice of word, but she didn’t dispute it. “My sister was like me—a nurse, couldn’t have kids, and her husband left her. We moved in together five years ago. Now I feel as if half of me is missing.”
She clamped her mouth shut, pushing a bite of burger around her plate with her fork.
“I can see how you would,” John said.
“For months, I couldn’t function,” she said. “So I decided to make some changes. New job, new—”
She stopped so abruptly, John knew she’d been about to say new man. Sorry though he was for her loss, he didn’t want to be that man.
He applied himself to his fries while Cathy ate her burger.
“Do you think you’ll be lonely now that Merry is married?” she asked. “Is that why you asked me out?”
He hardly knew how to answer such a direct question. “Merry didn’t live with me, so it doesn’t make much difference. We’ll still work together.”
“But her focus will be on her husband.”
“As it should be.” He decided to come clean. “Getting a transplant made me realize I hadn’t been living life to the fullest for a long time, and not just because of my health. Dating seemed an obvious area for improvement.”
“So you’re in the same place I am,” she said thoughtfully.
That sounded a little too cozy for his liking. John pushed his plate away, his burger unfinished. “Cathy, I’m feeling a bit dizzy....”
She leaned forward, her eyes intent. “That’ll be your medication. Is the dizziness severe? Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”
She sounded worried; guilt pricked John.
“It’s no worse than I’ve had the past few days,” he said. “I’ll be fine if I go home to rest.”
Next thing, she’d demanded the check from Merline, and John had to fight to stop her paying for the meal. “I’m dizzy, not broke,” he growled.
She flashed him a sudden smile. “Sorry. I know I can be obnoxious sometimes.”
“You’re okay,” he said gruffly. In fact, she was often obnoxious, but he could hardly agree with her.
She walked close beside him, watching him, as they left the restaurant. John was working on ways to convey I’m not in the mood, when she said, “You look steady on your feet and your color’s good.”
Her scrutiny was entirely medical. So much for his conceit.
“The dizziness has pretty much gone,” he said. “Guess I overreacted.”
“John, you just had major surgery. There’s no such thing as overreaction.”
Cathy took his arm, her motive clearly only to support him. They walked the hundred yards to her car, then drove back to Dwight and Stephanie’s place in silence.
“I’m feeling fine now,” John said. “No need for you to get out of the car.” He’d been waiting on the porch for her when she arrived, so he hadn’t introduced her to his friends. He didn’t want to have to do that now.
Short of saying, Goodbye, it’s been nice knowing you, which wouldn’t even be true, he felt he’d made it clear he wouldn’t be seeing her again.
“I had a nice time,” she said with a kind of determined cheer that didn’t ring true. Reminding him this had been some sort of test for her, too. “Can we do it again?”
Unlike him, she didn’t consider the test over.
John paused, one hand on the door handle. There was no chemistry between them, none of the magic he’d experienced on his first date with Sally, when he’d known instantly that she was The One. “Uh…”
“I’m working the afternoon shift the next three days,” she said doggedly, “not finishing until ten. But I have a day off on Sunday. How about I choose something for us to do?”
Her face was calm, expressionless. But her eyes…dammit, her eyes looked soft and vulnerable. She’d told him she’d lost half of herself, and he’d bet she didn’t tell a lot of people that. He knew how that felt, knew the pain.
“Sure,” he said without any encouragement.
She nodded once, as if to say, good enough.
John got of the car. He held on to the door handle for a moment to steady himself. Because now he really did feel dizzy.
* * *
LUCAS HAD INVADED MERRY’S LIFE. Unlike when they were kids, she couldn’t walk away and play with her girlfriends or her Barbie dolls, or anyone else equally unlikely to irritate.
She still didn’t know why he’d changed his mind about keeping up the pretense of their marriage—he’d refused to answer her questions on the subject—and why he’d volunteered to work at the boatyard. She appreciated his commitment, whatever the reason.
But by the time she and Lucas—and Boo—had been in her dad’s seafront cottage for ten days, she was ready to scream. And this was before they even started working together.
Merry had assumed the
ir mutual inclination for avoidance would mean they’d barely see each other.
But no. Lucas, who should surely be practicing his depth perception, or working out at the gym to get fit for duty, or something—anything!—else, had thrown himself into his Temporary Husband role.
I should have guessed, Merry told herself, as she switched on her computer the Monday morning that her dad was due to start back at the workshop. Even as a kid, Lucas had meticulously mapped out his campaigns with success in mind. Which was why it had been so easy, and fun, to frustrate him by ignoring his plans and doing her own thing.
Her opportunities to do that now were limited. Because everything Lucas was doing made sense, and was for unarguably good reasons.
So while it drove her nuts that he’d put a chart on the fridge to record her dad’s blood pressure when he reported in over the course of each day—information she usually kept in her head, and which was none of Lucas’s business—she couldn’t argue that if something went wrong, the doctors would be pleased to have that data written down.
And how could she refuse to have Lucas accompany her on visits to her father, when their entire marriage was for his benefit? When her dad was staying with Lucas’s parents? They visited John every day, with Lucas acting like the ideal husband. No one but Merry seemed to notice the perfunctory nature of his caresses and endearments.
And that was another thing. Those caresses were having an unmistakable and unwelcome effect on her, perfunctory or not. But it was obvious only one person in this marriage was suffering from fluttery insides and hypersensitive skin, while the other was attacking the mission of Being Merry’s Husband with military precision, and was thus unmoved by such pesky details as kisses.
Admittedly, she’d caught him eyeing her butt once or twice. Her chest, too. But on the whole, he showed a conspicuous lack of interest.
He was driving her nuts.
And now she had to work with him all day.
Over the past week, he’d been talking to John about how they might change things around at work to make them more manageable, and to share the load. Which was a great idea. Except Merry had assumed things could run pretty much as before, tweaked where necessary. She’d thought of today as the first day of life being back to normal.